NASA TV to Air News Briefing on Upcoming Spacewalk

NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will host a briefing at 2 p.m. EST (1 p.m. CST) on Tuesday, Jan. 12, to preview the tasks and preparation for a spacewalk by astronauts living aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The briefing and spacewalk will air live on NASA Television, and be streamed on NASA’s website. Coverage of the spacewalk will begin at 6:30 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 15, with the spacewalk scheduled to begin at 7:55 a.m.

Credit: NASA

Expedition 46 flight engineers Tim Kopra of NASA and Tim Peake of ESA (European Space Agency) will venture outside the space station’s Quest airlock to replace a failed voltage regulator that compromised one of the station’s eight power channels last November. The Jan. 15 spacewalk will be the third in Kopra’s career and the first for Peake, and the 192nd for maintenance of the space station.

The participants for the Jan. 12 briefing will include:

Kenneth Todd, ISS operations integration manager
Royce Renfrew, ISS spacewalk flight director
Paul Dum, lead spacewalk officer
Reporters may attend the briefing at Johnson and other participating NASA centers. Reporters interested in attending by phone must call the Johnson newsroom at 281-483-5111 no later than 1:45 p.m. on the day of the briefing.

This will be the 35th spacewalk using the U.S. Quest airlock, and will focus on replacing a voltage regulator called a Sequential Shunt Unit that failed Nov. 13, 2015. Additional tasks include deploying cables for the future installation of an International Docking Adapter that will accommodate U.S. commercial crew vehicles, and retrieving a broken light from a truss camera.